In August, 2001, the American television channel CBS aired an interview with a Hamas activist Muhammad Abu Wardeh, who recruited terrorists for suicide bombings in Israel. Abu Wardeh was quoted as saying: “I described to him how God would compensate the martyr for sacrificing his life for his land. If you become a martyr, God will give you 70 virgins, 70 wives and everlasting happiness.” Wardeh was in fact shortchanging his recruits since the rewards in Paradise for martyrs was 72 virgins. But I am running ahead of things . (more…)
I really enjoyed this film. Having been recently ruminating once more on the sociological pathology of Honour Killings and the necessity to control the chastity of young females in most patriarchical societies, this film made me wonder whether it was indeed the birth of the Austrian-’Jewish’ school of psychoanalysis which led to the advent of the liberation of female sexuality in Western society. This may be obvious to some, but I find the potential of this quite intriguing. Especially in light of my introduction to Otto Gross from this movie. He actually deserves a separate post on his own (soon). I think psychoanalysis may be owed a great debt by the Western Society generally, a society which today is quite distinct from its Victorian Era incarnation, having had so many taboos and inter-related psychic truths brought out of closets into the public to be acknowledged and dealt with.The writing in this film is quite erudite, making one almost want to take notes at times. Such as the questioning of WHY humans, while such sexual animals, have this overwhelming need to repress this sexuality at the same time. This of course, is what the foundation of psychoanalysis was all about–the search for an understanding of this unfortunate duality…which inevitably leads to emotional baggage in a great number of humanoids.This film is recommended for neurotic uber-ruminators. Perhaps as a elementary introduction to the history of psychoanalysis. Also do readThe Interpretation of Murder.
-rudhro
Keira Knightley in ‘A Dangerous Method’ — Oscar-Worthy or Laughable?
By Sharon Knolle
Sep 2nd 2011
Keira Knightley’s bold performance in David Cronenberg’s ‘A Dangerous Method’ is splitting critics at the Venice Film Festival, who are finding her role as an uninhibited mental patient “fabulous” or laughable. Either way, those who’ve seen the film agree that her approach is extreme. (more…)
This is remarkable. I personally would consider Autism, rather than the loons out there seeking Extraterrestrial origins. They should teach about these kindsa things in elementary to fire the minds of youngsters into the potential of humanity. Unfortunately, the European Jesus-heads who invaded Meso-America destroyed huge libraries of knowledge, assuming that it was Satan-worship—–and humanity lost a treasure trove of knowledge similar to this with the extinction of such awesome cultural relics. If this weren’t from Europe itself, I’d be surprised if it weren’t as well, similarly, destroyed. They should make perfect parchment replicas of this and sell em for $100–like that Tupac book that recreates his school books, back of napkin doodles and lyrical creation process…I would love to own one of these–talk about a conversation-starting coffee table book!
–rudhro
“The Voynich manuscript, described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript,” is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912. Some pages are missing, but the current version comprises about 240 vellum pages,[notes 1] most with illustrations. Much of the manuscript resembles an herbal of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript’s script and language remain unknown and unreadable. Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. Yet it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a historical cryptology cause célèbre. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels.”–wikipedia
These videos may be the most incredible thing i’ve discovered online…(click under the first video to see the others–they get better each time–episode 9 is my favourite)
An icon from India, Rabindranath Tagore wrote in virtually every literary genre, and he was also an accomplished painter. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
To celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth, Eleanor Wachtel speaks with literary scholar Uma Dasgupta and American philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
This was one of the best BBC documentaries I’ve ever seen, reminiscent of PLANET EARTH and just as in depth and in vivid colour, but rather than the natural world, it focuses on the civilizations that occupied the subcontinent since the time of the first humans to leave Africa. Superb–and I’m not merely saying that due to a DNA connection, I would have enjoyed this were it from any corner of the world. This is an intense study of the history of mankind, and the journey we’ve all taken thus far.
–rudhro
The Story of India is a BBC TV documentary series, written and presented by historian Michael Wood, about the 10,000-year history of the Indian subcontinent in six episodes.
An accompanying text was published by BBC Books.
As in most of his documentaries, Wood explains historical events by travelling to the places where they took place, examining archeological and historical evidence at first hand and interviewing historians and archaeologists, as well as chatting with local people. (more…)
Gil Scott-Heron died Friday afternoon in New York, his book publisher reported. He was 62. The influential poet and musician is often credited with being one of the progenitors of hip-hop, and is best known for the spoken-word piece “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. He spent his early years in Jackson, Tenn., attended high school in The Bronx, and spent time at Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University before settling in Manhattan. His recording career began in 1970 with the album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, which featured the first version of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The track has since been referenced and parodied extensively in pop culture.
Scott-Heron continued to record through the 1970s and early ’80s, before taking a lengthy hiatus. He briefly returned to the studio for 1994′s Spirits. That album featured the track “Message to the Messengers,” in which Scott-Heron cautions the hip-hop generation that arose in his absence to use its newfound power responsibly. He has been cited as a key influence by many in the hip-hop community — such as rapper-producer Kanye West, who closed his platinum-selling 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with a track built around a sample of Scott-Heron’s voice.
Scott-Heron struggled publicly with substance abuse in the 2000s, and spent the early part of the decade in and out of jail on drug possession charges. He began performing again after his release in 2007, and in 2010 released a new album, I’m New Here, to widespread critical acclaim.
Gil Scott-Heron, a godfather of rap, dies in New York
NEKESA MUMBI MOODY
NEW YORK— The Associated Press
Saturday, May. 28, 2011
Long before Public Enemy urged the need to Fight the Power or N.W.A. offered a crude rebuke of the police, Gil-Scott Heron was articulating the rage and the disillusionment of the black masses through song and spoken word. (more…)
I’ve spent most of the last eight years working in Iraq and also in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other countries in the Muslim world. So all my work has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror and has in fact been thanks to this war, even if I’ve labored to disprove the underlying premises of this war. In a way my work has still served to support the narrative. I once asked my editor at the New York Times Magazine if I could write about a subject outside the Muslim world. He said even if I was fluent in Spanish and an expert on Latin America I wouldn’t be published if it wasn’t about jihad.
Too often consumers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You think you can trust the articles you read, why wouldn’t you, you think you can sift through the ideological bias and just get the facts. But you don’t know the ingredients that go into the product you buy. It is important to understand how knowledge about current events in the Middle East is produced before relying on it. Even when there are no apparent ideological biases such as those one often sees when it comes to reporting about Israel, there are fundamental problems at the epistemological and methodological level. These create distortions and falsehoods and justify the narrative of those with power. (more…)
“Red Cloud (Lakota: Maȟpíya Lúta), (1822 – December 10, 1909) was a war leader and the head Chief of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux). His reign was from 1868 to 1909. One of the most capable Native American opponents the United States Army faced, he led a successful conflict in 1866–1868 known as Red Cloud’s War over control of the Powder River Country in northwestern Wyoming and southern Montana. After the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), he led his people in the important transition to reservation life. Some of his US opponents thought of him as overall leader of the Sioux, but this was mistaken. The large tribe had several major divisions and was highly decentralized. Bands among the Oglala and other divisions operated independently, even though some individual leaders such as Red Cloud were renowned as warriors.” –wikipedia
It is not unfair to say that Aztec culture was overwhelmingly eschatological in a way that can only be rivalled by early Christianity. The Aztecs, like the Mayans, believed that the universe had been created five times and destroyed four times; each of these five eras was called a Sun. The first age was called Four Ocelot (for it began on the date called Four Ocelot). Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror) dominated the universe and eventually became the sun disk. The world was destroyed by jaguars. The second age was Four Wind, dominated by Quetzalcoatl (Sovereign Plumed Serpent); men were turned to monkeys and the world was destroyed by hurricanes and tempests. The third age was Four Rain, dominated by Tlaloc (the rain god); the world was destroyed by a rain of fire. The fourth era was Four Water and was dominated by Chalchihuitlicue (Woman with the Turquoise Skirt); the world was destroyed by a flood. The fifth era, the one we live in now, is Four Earthquake, and is dominated by Tonatiuh, the Sun-God. This age will end in earthquakes.
es·cha·tol·o·gy (sk-tl-j)
n.
1. The branch of theology that is concerned with the end of the world or of humankind.
2. A belief or a doctrine concerning the ultimate or final things, such as death, the destiny of humanity, the Second Coming, or the Last Judgment.
Human social behavior has an evolutionary basis. This was the thesis in Edward O. Wilson’s book “Sociobiology” that caused such a stir, even though most evolutionary biologists accept that at least some social behaviors, like altruism, could be favored by natural selection
In a book to be published in April, “The Origins of Political Order,”Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University presents a sweeping new overview of human social structures throughout history, taking over from where Dr. Wilson’s ambitious synthesis left off.
Dr. Fukuyama, a political scientist, is concerned mostly with the cultural, not biological, aspects of human society. But he explicitly assumes that human social nature is universal and is built around certain evolved behaviors like favoring relatives, reciprocal altruism, creating and following rules, and a propensity for warfare.
Because of this shared human nature, with its biological foundation, “human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures,” he writes. It is these worldwide patterns he seeks to describe in an analysis that stretches from prehistoric times to the French Revolution. (more…)
Among the Romance languages, the development of Romanian is perhaps the least understood (Rosetti et al. 1969; Du Nay 1996; Sala 2005). There is an interval of several hundred years in which no historical record mentions its exis- tence,1 let alone providing scholars with samples to track its evolution (Rosetti et al. 1969, 481; Sala 2005, 25).
Romanian, like all Romance languages, has its own distinct features, owing principally to its particular local influences. This includes a significant influx of Slavic borrowings. One word of apparently Slavic origin in Romanian is da = yes. It seems impossible that any populace would choose to borrow such a basic word from another language. But the history of human speech does, in fact, attest examples of such counter-intuitive developments.2
In this particular case, however, I will argue that a possible Latin origin for Romanian da has been overlooked. With a Romance etymology for such a basic word established, a Slavic source may be unnecessary. (more…)
– Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321), Italian poet of the Middle Ages
The Italian medieval poet was highlighting three major Romance languages which were well known in Italy, based on each language’s word for “yes”, the òc language (Occitan), the oïl language(French), and the sì language (various Italian and Iberian languages).
THE THREE YESES:
The word òc came from Vulgar Latin hoc (“this”).
The word oïl came from Latin hoc illud (“this [is] it”).
Other Romance languages derive their word for yes from the Latin sic, “thus [it is], [it was done], etc.”, such as Spanish sí,Eastern Lombard sé, Italian sì, or Portuguese sim.
In Modern Catalan, as in modern Spanish, sí is usually used as a response, although the language retains the word oi, akin to òc, which is sometimes used at the end of yes-no questions. (more…)
No ‘truth’ is contained within a MEME, merely a convention.
When an isolated tribe of humans die off, that which can be reconceived by strangers is TRUTH, that which is lost, was a meme.
‘Zero’ is a truth — Hindus, Mayans, conceived of this mathematical necessity independently.
All extinct languages, religions, recipes, stories, fashions etc were memes.
A meme is not a description of reality.
We need to teach our children this… or even to understand memetics and to be capable of identifying it in our world.
Atheism is the identification and recognition of the presence of memetics in the world.
–rudhro
____________________________
Definitions of a “meme”
“meme” (mi:m), n. Biol. (shortened from mimeme … that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”.
Oxford English Dictionary, 1998
“a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”
Dawkins, 1976
“that which is imitated”
–rudhro
Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of memes — concepts that are literally alive.
There are at least 250,000 words in the English language. However, to think that English – or any language – could hold enough expression to convey the entirety of the human experience is as arrogant of an assumption as it is naive.
Here are a few examples of instances where other languages have found the right word and English simply falls speechless. (more…)
The Hollow Men (1925) is a major poem by T. S. Eliot, the Nobel-Prize-winning modernist poet. Its themes are, like many of Eliot’s poems, overlapping and fragmentary, but it is recognised to be concerned most with post-War Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised: compare “Gerontion”), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, and, as some critics argue, Eliot’s own failed marriage (Vivienne Eliot may have been having an affair with Bertrand Russell).
Eliot wrote that he produced the title “The Hollow Men” by combining the titles of the romance “The Hollow Land” by William Morris with the poem “The Broken Men” by Rudyard Kipling:[2] but it is possible that this is one of Eliot’s many constructed allusions, and that the title originates more transparently from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or from the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness who is referred to as a “hollow sham” and “hollow at the core”.
The two epigraphs to the poem, “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” and “A penny for the Old Guy“, are allusions to Conrad’s character and to Guy Fawkes, attempted arsonist of the English house of Parliament, and his straw-man effigy that is burned each year in the United Kingdom on Guy Fawkes Night. (more…)
“hey, have you not heard that an anti-thesis of religion is in fact religion? When one hates a religion he in fact wants to create his own religion. So, he fucks himself too” – a response to rudhro’s ruminatoria
Begging the Question (Petitio Principii)
Fallacies of Presumption
By Austin Cline
Fallacy Name: Begging the Question
Alternative Names: Petitio Principii Circular Argument Circulus in Probando Circulus in Demonstrando Vicious Circle Category:
Fallacy of Weak Induction > Fallacy of Presumption
Explanation: This is the most basic and classic example of a Fallacy of Presumption, because it directly presumes the conclusion which is at question in the first place. This can also be known as a “Circular Argument” – because the conclusion essentially appears both at the beginning and the end of the argument, it creates an endless circle, never accomplishing anything of substance.
A good argument in support of a claim will offerindependent evidence or reasons to believe that claim. However, if you are assuming the truth of some portion of your conclusion, then your reasons are no longer independent: your reasons have become dependent upon the very point which is contested. The basic structure looks like this: (more…)
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think. (more…)
Kavithai Gundar is a Tamil hip hop music album. After the success of “Vallavan” performed by Yogi B, Dr.Burn and Emcee Jesz, Emcee Jesz created this Tamil Hip Hop album as a solo project.
Theunis Bates is a London-based journalist. He writes for Time, Fast Company and Business Life.
(June 27) — The crucifix is the defining symbol of Christianity, a constant reminder to the faithful of the sacrifice and suffering endured by Jesus Christ for humanity. But an extensive study of ancient texts by a Swedish pastor and academic has revealed that Jesus may not have died on a cross, but instead been put to death on another gruesome execution device.
Gunnar Samuelsson — a theologian at the University of Gothenburg and author of a 400-page thesis on crucifixion in antiquity — doesn’t doubt that Jesus died on Calvary hill. But he argues that the New Testament is in fact far more ambiguous about the exact method of the Messiah’s execution than many Christians are aware.
“When the Gospels refer to the death of Jesus, they just say that he was forced to carry a “stauros” out to Calvary,” he told AOL News. Many scholars have interpreted that ancient Greek noun as meaning “cross,” and the verb derived from it, “anastauroun,” as implying crucifixion. But during his three-and-a-half-year study of texts from around 800 BC to the end of the first century AD, Samuelsson realized the words had more than one defined meaning.
“‘Stauros’ is actually used to describe a lot of different poles and execution devices,” he says. “So the device described in the Gospels could have been a cross, but it could also have been a spiked pole, or a tree trunk, or something entirely different.” In turn, “anastauroun” was used to signify everything from the act of “raising hands to suspending a musical instrument.”
The manner in which Jesus died is further thrown into question by Samuelsson’s discovery that crucifixion may have been an unusual form of punishment in the Roman Empire. Descriptions of crucifixions contained in the thousands of Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Greek manuscripts he examined most commonly referred to dead prisoners being placed on some form of suspension device, or living captives skewered on stakes. The first century Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger, for example, wrote about seeing a great many prisoners of war on “crosses” after one campaign. But the scribe then describes how a large number of the dead had been impaled.
“If you search for ancient texts that specifically mention the act of crucifixion [as we understand it today]” he says, “you will end up with only two or three examples.”
That revelation stands in stark contrast to claims that appear in many books on the historical Jesus, as well as more general surveys of life under Roman rule, which state that prisoners were routinely nailed to crosses. (The Encylopaedia Britannica, for example, says crucifixion was an “important method of capital punishment” in Rome.)
Of course, this lack of hard evidence doesn’t mean that the Roman Empire was a crucifix-free zone. Samuelsson suspects that crucifixion was simply one of a great many methods of execution employed across the empire. He notes that Flavius Josephus — a Jewish historian and adviser to three Roman emperors in the 1st century — recorded how Roman soldiers were allowed to use their “wicked minds in various ways to execute” prisoners captured during a Jewish uprising. This suggests that the method of Jesus’ execution may have been decided by legionnaires stationed at Calvary, and not by the state.
“If we put this on the table, and think that the execution of Jesus was the result of the wicked mind of the soldiers at that very point, we can’t know how he could have been executed,” Samuelsson says. “The executions of that day could have taken a completely different form from ones the day before.”
The Swedish scholar isn’t sure exactly why the crucifix went on to become the dominant Christian motif. But this symbol only seems to have become fixed in followers’ minds long after Jesus’ death, as the first T and X shaped crucifixes appear in Christian manuscripts around the 2nd century AD.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Samuelsson’s thesis has caused something of an unheavenly row. While fellow theologians have complimented his highly detailed research, many critics in the blogospherehave claimed that he wants to undermine Christianity. Samuelsson — who believes that “the man who walked this earth was the Son of God, and that he will return to judge the living and the dead” — says this accusation is simply “stupid.”
“I’m really just a boring, conservative pastor and I start everyday reading the New Testament,” he says. “But my suggestion is that we should read the text as it is, not as we think it is.”
Shanghai has been trying to harness English translations that sometimes wander, like “cash recyling machine.”
May 2, 2010
By ANDREW JACOBS
SHANGHAI — For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.”
The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”
Those who have had a bit too much monolithic tree mushroom stem squid could find themselves requiring roomier attire: extra-large sizes sometimes come in “fatso” or “lard bucket” categories. These and other fashions can be had at the clothing chain known as Scat.
Go ahead and snicker, although by last Saturday’s opening of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai, drawing more than 70 million visitors over its six-month run, these and other uniquely Chinese maladaptations of the English language were supposed to have been largely excised.
Well, that at least is what the Shanghai Commission for the Management of Language Use has been trying to accomplish during the past two years.
Fortified by an army of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers, the commission has fixed more than 10,000 public signs (farewell “Teliot” and “urine district”), rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.
The campaign is partly modeled on Beijing’s herculean effort to clean up English signage for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which led to the replacement of 400,000 street signs, 1,300 restaurant menus and such exemplars of impropriety as the Dongda Anus Hospital — now known as the Dongda Proctology Hospital. Gone, too, is Racist Park, a cultural attraction that has since been rechristened Minorities Park.
“The purpose of signage is to be useful, not to be amusing,” said Zhao Huimin, the former Chinese ambassador to the United States who, as director general of the capital’s Foreign Affairs Office, has been leading the fight for linguistic standardization and sobriety.
But while the war on mangled English may be considered a signature achievement of government officials, aficionados of what is known as Chinglish are wringing their hands in despair.
Oliver Lutz Radtke, a former German radio reporter who may well be the world’s foremost authority on Chinglish, said he believed that China should embrace the fanciful melding of English and Chinese as the hallmark of a dynamic, living language. As he sees it, Chinglish is an endangered species that deserves preservation.
“If you standardize all these signs, you not only take away the little giggle you get while strolling in the park but you lose a window into the Chinese mind,” said Mr. Radtke, who is the author of a pair of picture books that feature giggle-worthy Chinglish signs in their natural habitat.
Lest anyone think it is all about laughs, Mr. Radtke is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Chinglish at the University of Heidelberg.
Still, the enemies of Chinglish say the laughter it elicits is humiliating. Wang Xiaoming, an English scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, painfully recalls the guffaws that erupted among her foreign-born colleagues as they flipped through a photographic collection of poorly written signs. “They didn’t mean to insult me but I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable,” said Ms. Wang, who has since become one of Beijing’s leading Chinglish slayers.
Those who study the roots of Chinglish say many examples can be traced to laziness and a flawed but wildly popular translation software. Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, said the computerized dictionary, Jingshan Ciba, had led to sexually oriented vulgarities identifying dried produce in Chinese supermarkets and the regrettable “fried enema” menu selection that should have been rendered as “fried sausage.”
Although improved translation software and a growing zeal for grammatically unassailable English has slowed the output of new Chinglishisms, Mr. Mair said he still received about five new examples a day from people who knew he was good at deciphering what went wrong. “If someone would pay me to do it, I’d spend my life studying these things,” he said.
Among those getting paid to wrestle with Chinglish is Jeffrey Yao, an English translator and teacher at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation at Shanghai International Studies University who is leading the sign exorcism. But even as he eradicates the most egregious examples by government fiat — businesses dare not ignore the commission’s suggested fixes — he has mixed feelings, noting that although some Chinglish phrases sound awkward to Western ears, they can be refreshingly lyrical. “Some of it tends to be expressive, even elegant,” he said, shuffling through an online catalog of signs that were submitted by the volunteers who prowled Shanghai with digital cameras. “They provide a window into how we Chinese think about language.”
He offered the following example: While park signs in the West exhort people to “Keep Off the Grass,” Chinese versions tend to anthropomorphize nature as a way to gently engage the stomping masses. Hence, such admonishments as “The Little Grass Is Sleeping. Please Don’t Disturb It” or “Don’t Hurt Me. I Am Afraid of Pain.”
Mr. Yao read off the Chinese equivalents as if savoring a Shakespearean sonnet. “How lovely,” he said with a sigh.
He pointed out that this linguistic mentality helped create such expressions as “long time no see,” a word-for-word translation of a Chinese expression that became a mainstay of spoken English. But Mr. Yao, who spent nearly two decades working as a translator in Canada, has his limits. He showed a sign from a park designed to provide visitors with the rules for entry, which include prohibitions on washing, “scavenging,” clothes drying and public defecation, all of it rendered in unintelligible — and in the case of the last item — rather salty English. The sign ended with this humdinger: “Because if the tourist does not obey the staff to manage or contrary holds, Does, all consequences are proud.”
Even though he had had the sign corrected recently, Mr. Yao could not help but shake his head in disgust at the memory. And he was irritated to find that a raft of troublesome sign verbiage had slipped past the commission as the expo approached, including a cafeteria sign that read, “The tableware reclaims a place.” (Translation: drop off dirty dishes here.)
“Some Chinglish expressions are nice, but we are not translating literature here,” he said. “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”
Sarah Silverman thinks young women need better role models. The potty mouthed comedian says she sees the women on The Bachelor or The Real Housewives of New York, women defined by their money or their need for a man, and she fears for girls watching television.
“It’s terrifying.”
Of course, some might say that a comedian with a penchant for swearing and making rape jokes might not be the ideal role model either. But while Silverman has had her fair share of controversy over the years, her humour, she says, is always meant to reveal the stupidity of anyone who might think the way her onstage persona does.
“I can’t control how people infer my jokes or hear them. But to me, I’m always the idiot in my jokes. I may have jokes that invoke rape or the Holocaust and awful, tragic, terrible things. But I’m never making fun of those things,” she says.
“ When you’re wondering what 14-year-old boys want to hear, you’re not going to be putting out anything worth seeing.”
In her new memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, Silverman offers a glimpse into how she became one of the most popular comedians working today, from her early days doing stand up in New York, her brief stint on Saturday Night Live, through to her work on her television show, The Sarah Silverman Program. Much of the book delves into deeply personal territory, such as spending most of her teen years on various pharmaceuticals in her battle with depression and the shame of wetting the bed well into high school thanks to having a small bladder.
“I didn’t want to be a comic who transcribes jokes onto pages,” she says.
Instead, Silverman explains how she first got hooked on making people laugh. Perhaps not surprisingly, it all started with swearing. She learned to swear from her father when she was just three years old, growing up in New Hampshire. Every time she said a bad word, her dad cracked up uncontrollably.
“He got a kick out of hearing a little girl swear and I think I kind of got into getting that reaction of approval from grown-ups. It became a little addicting,” Silverman says. She’s been chasing that high ever since, she adds.
But it was peeing the bed that proved to be pivotal for the 39-year-old comedian.
“It was a source of a very early sense of humiliation,” she says. Yet all the years of living in fear of waking up with wet sheets at a sleepover or camp made the idea of performing on stage seem easy by comparison. “The prospect of bombing when I was starting out was not so scary.”
The jokes have certainly landed Silverman in trouble. In 2001, for example, Silverman used a derogatory word for Chinese-Americans during an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien that resulted in her coming under fire from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans.
At the MTV Movie Awards in 2007, Silverman took aim at Paris Hilton, who was in the audience and about to go to jail for drunk driving. Silverman’s jabs were decried as “nasty” and “vicious” across the blogosphere.
But she’s learned she has to take her lumps.
“Part of taking a chance is that you’re taking a chance that it’s not going to go well, and you have to suffer the consequences.”
Yet while Silverman has no problem mocking celebrities or bringing up subjects like the Holocaust in her comedy, there is one thing she says she won’t joke about.
“Fat jokes about women just burn me out,” she says.
As often as she puts up a hard exterior, she never wants to come across as mean. “I care about being funny and being kind,” she says.
Yet it is hard not to want to be that much more edgy or insensitive as a female comedian working in what’s essentially a boys club. But Silverman is judged by other standards as well. She’s made Maxim magazine’s hot 100 list twice – and has appeared on a few worst dressed lists over the years. You would never see Zach Galifianakis’ wardrobe being criticized by the entertainment industry. But Silverman has learned to brush it off.
“That’s a double standard I could give a shit about,” she says. “I never really second guess the stuff I do. I never try to wonder, ‘What do people want to hear?’ before I write. I think that’s the killer of comedy,” she says. “When you’re wondering what 14-year-old boys want to hear, you’re not going to be putting out anything worth seeing.”
Silverman is certainly not worried about what some might think about God being the author of the afterword of her memoir. The supreme being was not hard to get on the project, Silverman says.
“He’s a total pushover. Give him like, two compliments, and he’ll do anything,” she says.
Her act is just a Rorschach test, Silverman says. People will see what they want to see in it.
“I embrace the fact that my intention is not always going to be what people take in, or infer. And once it’s out there, it’s the audiences’s to hear,” she says. “But if they glean something from what I saw, or it makes them think, or they take something away from it that’s smart, that has more to do with them than me. But I’ll take all the credit they want to give to me.”
“The Voynich manuscript, described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript,” is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912. Some pages are missing, but the current version comprises about 240 vellum pages,[notes 1] most with illustrations. Much of the manuscript resembles an herbal of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript’s script and language remain unknown and unreadable. Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. Yet it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a historical cryptology cause célèbre. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels.”
These videos may be the most incredible thing i’ve discovered online…(click under the first video to see the others–they get better each time–episode 9 is my favourite)
The Story of India is a BBC TV documentary series, written and presented by historian Michael Wood, about the 10,000-year history of the Indian subcontinent in six episodes. 
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